


The Lord Said Jump (and let you fall)

by Littlenerdyemo



Series: Fifth Day 'vers [2]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Supernatural
Genre: Aziraphale and Crowley are Castiel's parents, Aziraphale's Bookshop (Good Omens), Biblically Accurate Angels, Fallen Angel Castiel (Supernatural), Father Figures, Father-Son Relationship, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, They/Them Pronouns for Crowley (Good Omens), Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-10
Updated: 2020-09-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:15:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26387773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Littlenerdyemo/pseuds/Littlenerdyemo
Summary: Castiel falls. This is life in the aftermath.(Or: Aziraphale and Crowley are there to pick him up, and how that plays out.)
Relationships: Aziraphale (Good Omens) & Castiel (Supernatural), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens), Castiel (Supernatural) & Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Fifth Day 'vers [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1918189
Comments: 6
Kudos: 178





	The Lord Said Jump (and let you fall)

**Author's Note:**

> Before we get into anything else: Content warning.  
> Cas has an inhuman number of eyes all over his body which are described in detail several times, so if that makes you queasy please click off. Take care of yourselves!

_Dean Winchester's soul is familiar in Castiel's hand._

_It burns brightly, and though he knows it belongs to a human now, he cannot help but admire what a powerful weapon it used to be._

_It's only thanks to years of practice that he was able to distinguish it from hellfire, that he is now able to carry it upwards to the world. It nearly drags him back down, and Castiel recalls an ill timed joke about sauntering vaguely downwards. But he grips it tight, and comes out of the fire standing._

_(The rest of his brothers, his soldiers, don't make it out.)_

  
  


They drive to pick Castiel up in the Bentley. 

He is shivering through his torn coat,(even his fashion sense, right there in the middle between Crowley's love for the inconvenient and uncomfortable and Aziraphale's for the... Beige.) and looking seconds away from dying of hypothermia. 

The road around him is not as much a road anymore as it is a crater, and they jump in their seats as the Bentley drives over the cracks in the asphalt while the radio speaker informs them of an unforeseen meteor passing in earth’s lower orbit. She finishes with an official statement from NASA, who promises the meteor is nothing to worry about, as it has burned away in the atmosphere.

Aziraphale and Crowley exchange twin looks of dismay at her words. The meteor fell to earth all right. 

The meteor is what’s left of their son.

  
  


He is a mess of bloodshot eyes and black, charred wings. He will learn to hide them, eventually, to retreat the eyes into his skin and fold his wings around his body, impossibly close and tight underneath his big tan coat. But they will be there; physical and just a touch away. 

(Maybe Aziraphale will buy him a new one. He’s going to need a bigger size.)

He looks up at them, hundreds of eyes peeking through the holes in his clothes, all turning to look at Aziraphale and Crowley in unison. They are blue, every single eyeball, but the color is muddy and dark. 

They will never flash that bright, searing shade again. Perhaps a demonic black or the more common fallen red. Maybe Crowley's yellow. 

(Though with Castiel's preferred choice of company lately, Aziraphale sincerely wishes it wouldn’t be the latter.)

  
  


The drive is silent, and Castiel moves his head to a rhythm only he can hear. He doesn’t share the name of the song when they ask, but when Crowley attempts to turn on one of their endless queen cassettes he makes a distressed noise and nearly blows the radio up in two. 

They don’t attempt to coax a verbal response out of him after that.

“Sorry about your radio.” Castiel says. It’s the only thing he’d said throughout the entire ride.

“It’s fine”, Crowley says. They can’t think of anything to add.

  
  


“Would you like some tea?” Aziraphale asks. 

He’d sat Castiel down onto a yellow couch ten minutes ago, before running into the storage room with Crowley, presumably to freak out about the fact that their son was now a demon. Castiel hasn’t moved since then, except for his eyes blinking periodically, in a languid, synchronized movement.

“Castiel?”

He thinks about objecting, explaining that his vessel doesn’t need the nourishment and that Castiel won’t feel the satisfaction, only the molecules. _But Aziraphale already knows that, of course._ He’s reaching for straws, trying to pull his son out of a place he himself has never been in; trying to help him the only way he knows how.

“Yes.” Castiel says. (Lets him try to help.)

The tea doesn’t taste like molecules. It tastes like… Well. It’s the first thing Castiel has ever actually tasted in his entire life. It just _tastes_.

“Can I have more?” Castiel asks. Then, almost bashfully, “Do you have any other types?”

They go through Aziraphale’s entire pantry, even the Da Hong Pao that Aziraphale had to say goodbye to his Manchester Edition of the bible in order to pay for. 

“That’s too bad”, Castiel says thoughtfully. “It was my favorite. Lots of bees.”

Aziraphale doesn’t tell him that’s precisely why he sold that one.

  
  
  


The last time Crowley had seen Castiel was in 1901. He had a different vessel then, with long hair and from the gender that used to wear the skirts. (Funnily enough, she had the same awful affinity for beige. Crowley had yet to decipher whether it was a Castiel or a Novak thing.)

Castiel was hostile at best, and Crowley had spent most of that visit under the distinct impression that had it not been for Aziraphale, an angel blade may very well have found its place between their ribs.

“I’m sorry.” Castiel says.

(Angels don’t apologize. They don’t do “sorry”s because they don’t do “wrong”.)

( _But he isn’t an angel anymore, is he?_ )

“You were my -” Castiel falters, struggling for a word. Mother and Father fit Crowley just as well, but not completely. Never one thing, a single label. Maybe that’s why they hadn’t fit into heaven in the first place. “Guardian”, Castiel settles on, “just as much as Aziraphale was. You made me who I am. Your being a Fallen doesn’t change that. I see that now”. He chuckles bitterly. 

“I wish I’d seen it then.”

His wings are all over the place, smearing ash and sooth across his face, dragging dirty lines down the trenchcoat he had refused to take off, even though it had two huge, gaping holes in the back. He keeps blinking furiously, his non-facial eyes probably sensitive and irritated from constantly rubbing against his dirty clothes.

“Let me help with that,” Crowley says. They can’t think of a proper response; it's becoming a regular occurrence, Castiel stunning them into silence. He has changed, immensely and rapidly, and Crowley wasn’t there. “Can’t be too comfortable, with all that dirt and ash weighing down your wings.”

“That sounds - lovely. Thank you.” Castiel says. If he’s hurt by Crowley’s deflection, he doesn’t show it.

  
  


Simply miracling the dirt away is out of the question. Magic with magic doesn't mix well together, and angel wings are nothing but magic wrapped in a thin layer of sinew and feathers.

Aziraphale’s bookshop doesn’t have a bathroom - or even a running sink for that matter - so Crowley drives the three of them to their place. (They haven’t been in the apartment for more than a few minutes at a time for years, other than keeping the plants alive and properly terrified. It still has running water when they turn on the shower, though, because Crowley hasn’t learned the first thing about water bills when they first moved in and has vehemently refused to do so since.) They help Castiel take off his coat - offering to cut it off him so he doesn’t have to pull it over the fresh burns that litter Castiel’s entire wingspan - but Castiel refuses. They can’t touch that coat. They can’t ruin it.

He seems to have no such qualms about the rest of his clothes, though, since he lets Crowley cut the jacket and shirt off, and dumps the shreds unceremoniously on the floor. He may not be an angel anymore, but he certainly isn’t human, and the intimacy they associate with nakedness is lost on him. 

His wingspan is simply too big to fit inside Crowley’s tiny stand up shower, so they make him sit on the toilet seat, extending one wing at a time. Aziraphale hovers near the door nervously. He’s unsure what to do, afraid to make an even bigger mess of Castiel’s back than it already is. He’d never had physical wings to take care of, so Crowley hands him a sponge and shows him how to work in the direction of the feathers and not against it.

(He hopes this is the last time he’ll ever have to clean the ash off the wings of someone he loves.)

  
  
  


“What now?” Castiel asks, after his wings are patted dry and he has put his coat back on. “Where should I go?” 

He looks so small, his vessel engulfed by wings nearly double its size. For a split second, Crowley can see his true form, so much bigger than this body, folded on itself hundreds of times to fit inside his vessel. There are hairline fractures in it, every place where it merges with his vessel in the shape of an eye or a wing. 

The Fallen’s relationship with their vessel is a curious one, somewhere between possession and a fusion. Sometimes the result is decay, other times an inhuman appearance that never quite goes away. 

Crowley blinks, and the yellow in his eyes retreats into the iris. Castiel’s true form disappears.

“Here.” Aziraphale says, with his lips pursed and his hands on his hips. It’s a gesture Crowley recognizes, from the days they were masquerading as a nanny and a gardener, their brief stint at stopping their own apocalypse. “You stay here.”

Hell is going to be after him. He has caused them so many casualties; crashed the party they’ve been planning for millennia. It depends, really, only whether they see him as an asset or a threat. But either way, they’ll hunt him down.

So of course he’ll stay. There is no other option.

“But -”

“No buts”, Aziraphale cuts him off. It’s probably the rudest thing he has ever done in his life, and Crowley couldn’t be any prouder. “You’re our son. You need help, and you need a place to stay. We have both.”

Crowley has never loved him more.

“Please”, Crowley adds. “We’d be happy to have you. And Angel could really use another pair of hands in the shop.”

Castiel nods. Crowley will never know whether it’s the idea of being wanted or the idea of being needed that finally convinced him (he had always been somewhat of a people pleaser, after all), but he says, “I’ll stay.”

  
  
  


“I need a favour.” Castiel says. He rarely asks for anything, even when he needs help reaching the top shelf or more sugar for his tea.

“What is it?” Crowley asks, not looking up from the crosswords they were currently rearranging in order to render it completely impossible to solve. (Aziraphale was getting rid of some of the puzzle books to make room for his new arthurian collection, and the puzzle books were about to be sent to a secondhand bookshop on Monday. When Crowley asked Aziraphale why he couldn’t just sell them in his _own_ shop, Aziraphale muttered something about a reputation and not wanting “them” to get any ideas.)

“My friend is trapped in hell.” 

Crowley sputters, setting down the crossword (number thirteen out of forty-two) on the couch next to them. “And you want me to get him out?”

“Please.” Castiel says. (He has never been one for pleading.) “He’s in the cage. He is a good man. He doesn’t deserve it.”

“You want me to save SAM WINCHESTER?” Crowley yells, his tongue shooting out of his mouth. “THE Sam Winchester?”

“How do you know it’s Sam?” Castiel says, almost defensively. “Adam is there too.”

“Well, yes”, Crowley says, waving his hand dismissively, “but you wouldn’t ask me to save _Adam_.”

  
  


Castiel is silent as they sink down The Stairs, pulling his eyes up his arms where they can be hidden underneath his jacket. He hasn’t quite mastered fully retreating them into his body yet; perhaps he never will.

"No", Crowley says, his yellow eyes watching the blue of Castiel’s disappear behind his sleeves, "leave them in the open. If we’re lucky, it'll intimidate the human demons away from a fight." They’ve taken their sunglasses off, presumably for the same reasons. When they speak, their tongue is forked.

  
  
  


“Thank you.” Castiel says, when Sam Winchester’s soul is once again alone in his body, and said body is laid out on the solid ground outside a human hospital. “Thank you.” he says again, with more emphasis this time, repeating it over and over. It’s his own way of expressing the sincerity of his words, and Crowley understands.

“It’s nothing. What’s a little trip to hell for family?”

**Author's Note:**

> I meant this work to have a 1k word count as well (I find that having a word count to strive to really helps motivate me) but there was simply no way I could fit everything that I wanted to into this fic at 1k. Even at 2k I had to cut some of the longer sentences out.  
> Also, if I continue this series, please note that this is most likely going to be the style I use to write. The previous work was an experiment and while I really liked the result, it doesn't work well for stories that take place in short periods of times where individual words and actions are important.  
> Originally Crowley and Cas were going to save Adam too, but I felt like that didn't really fall in line with their characters. Also, getting Sam+soul out of hell must have been hard enough as is.  
> Reminder that comments>kudos!  
> Have a lovely day<3


End file.
